AFP

BRUSSELS- Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan brought along his own copy of EU president Herman Van Rompuy's haiku poems and had it autographed Monday.
A Japanese government spokesman, Noriyuki Shikata, told AFP that at bilateral EU-Japan talks on the sidelines of an Asia-Europe Meeting, Kan asked Van Rompuy to sign a copy of his April-published first book of haikus or mini-poems in the Japanese style.

Naoto Kan

"The conciseness of haiku offers me the opportunity to penetrate the essence of words by expressing so much in so little space in an unaffected language," the former Belgian prime minister said when he published the volume.
The EU president said he caught the haiku bug in 2004 and "I have not stopped since then."
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